Beloved, Toni Morrison Notes II PDF

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Professor Martha Cutter...

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ENGL 4203W 2/19/2019 Beloved pages 196 - 277 The Middle Passage ● Horrific transporting of slaves during the Transatlantic Slave Trade ● Dehumanized ○ Tightly packed in slave ships ○ Illness, death, starvation ○ Heads shaved ○ Bodies thrown overboard, slaves chained together and thrown overboard alive ○ Women raped ● Morrison dedicates her book to the “Sixty Million and More” who died in the Middle Passage ○ “And more” - the ancestors of those who died ■ Generational trauma ● Is Beloved the ghost of a survivor of the Middle Passage? Or the ghost of its ancestor? Beloved ● Is she a Ghost? Is she the Ghost of the Dead Baby Girl? ○ Evidence for: ■ Memory of Sethe’s earrings ■ Knowing the song that Sethe only sang to her children ■ Craving sugar like a child would ■ “Beloved” is the name carved in the Dead Baby Girl’s tombstone ○ Evidence against: ■ Her dance ■ Going through the passage ■ The bridge? ● A bridge between the living world and the dead? ○ Is she an actual survivor of the Middle Passage or living an ancestral memory of the Middle Passage? ● What do ghosts represent in general in culture? ○ Unfinished business - of Sethe’s dead child but also of slavery itself ● Why does Morrison turn to the supernatural? Is this effective in representing the horrors of slavery? ○ Our culture is haunted by slavery - we, as a culture, have not put it to rest

ENGL 4203W 2/19/2019 Sethe ● Named after her father ● Her mother gives her this name because she was repeatedly raped by white men - she threw all of the babies away except for Sethe, who was conceived willingly with a black man Rememory ● What is it? ○ Reliving remembered experiences ○ Empathy ■ Feeling the pain of others and living their stories, even if you have not experienced them yourself ○ You can “bump into the rememory that belonged to somebody else” ■ Sethe fears that if Denver ever goes to Sweet Home, the place will hold the feelings and memories that Sethe experienced and Denver will live the tragedy all over ● Is it positive or negative? ○ Traumatic memory, trauma time ○ Sethe argues that memory remains, time does not erase it ○ Is there any way out of rememory for Morrison? ■ Storytelling as a way beyond rememory? Doesn’t seem like this is a way of exiting trauma time, however The Four Narratives on pages 236 - 256 ● Sethe, Denver, Beloved - first three are separate narratives ● Last is ll three mingled together, combining consciousnesses ○ Dependency, chain-link relationship of caretaking ● Breakdown of the “schoolteacher” way of reading things - can’t categorize or pin down these metaphors; passages are meant to be a space of meditation ● Trapped in this space of traumatic memory/rememory “A hot thing” ● The branding iron - literal interpretation ● Anger - metaphorical interpretation ○ The child’s anger at her mother for abandoning her, anger at the man with the nice teeth for leaving her...